It's Not About the Gun: Lessons from My Global Career as a Female FBI Agent

By Kathy Stearman

After spending more than twenty-years years as a Special Agent with the FBI, Kathy Stearman recounts the global experiences that shaped her life—and the mixed feelings that she now holds about the sacrifices she had to make to survive in a man’s world.

When former FBI Agent Kathy Stearman read in the New York Times that sixteen women were suing the FBI for discrimination at the training academy, she was surprised to see the women come forward—no one ever had before. But the truth behind their accusations resonated.

After a twenty-six-year career in the Bureau, Kathy Stearman knows from personal experience that this type of behavior has been prevalent for decades. Stearman’s It’s Not About the Gun examines the influence of attitude and gender in her journey to becoming FBI Legal Attaché, the most senior FBI representative in a foreign office.

When she entered the FBI Academy in 1987, Stearman was one of about 600 women in a force of 10,000 agents. While there, she evolved into an assertive woman, working her way up the ranks and across the globe to hold positions that very few women have held before. And yet, even at the height of her career, Stearman had to check herself to make sure that she never appeared weak, inferior, or afraid. The accepted attitude for women in power has long been cool, calm, and in control—and sometimes that means coming across as cold and emotionless.

Stearman changed for the FBI, but she longs for a different path for future women of the Bureau. If the system changes, then women can remain constant, valuing their female identity and nurturing the people they truly are. In It's Not About the Gun, Stearman describes how she was viewed as a woman and an American overseas, and how her perception of her country and the FBI, observed from the optics of distance, has evolved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643137315

Kathy Stearman

Kathy Stearman is a retired FBI Special Agent who spent several years as head of FBI offices in south-central Asia and China. This is her first book. 

Book preview

PART ONE

RESTLESS YEARNING

CHAPTER ONE

RESTLESS YEARNING

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.

—Lord Byron, Don Juan

In south-central Kentucky, there is a place of rolling green hills, incredible beauty, the hum and vibration of machinery and barnyard animals. And silence. An absence of words and voices.

The year before I was born, my parents bought this place, the farm where I grew up. Three hundred acres of black dirt, the farm lay in the lush, fertile curve of the Green River, a tributary of the Ohio running four hundred miles through south-central Kentucky. A two-lane blacktopped country road bisected the farm. You could drive on that road and soon hit a dirt road leading down and down and down to the slow-moving, gray-green river itself. If you happened to make a right just before you hit the dirt road, you could cut across farms that lay in that wide curve and come out on another two-lane country road that eventually led back to the crossroad at the community of Gabe, a smattering of white clapboard houses, a red-brick Baptist church, and a country store. Across the road from the country store was a dollhouse of a post office, long shuttered after its merger with a larger crossroad about five miles away and closer to town, the county seat called Greensburg. Greensburg, Kentucky, in Green County on the Green River was my world, a verdant kaleidoscope, encircled and held within the confines of a cerulean sky.

Two hundred cows grazed on our dairy and tobacco farm. They needed milking twice a day, seven days a week, 365 days each year. There was no time off, no vacations. The only time I ever recall my parents taking a nap was on Sunday afternoons, after church and Sunday dinner, our midday meal. On Sundays, my father was adamant about observing the Sabbath, the holy day when God is to be respected and labor was frowned upon. I never understood how my father justified milking the cows twice on Sundays, which constituted labor in my eyes. At a young age, I hadn’t yet learned to question my father. I only knew that I had to tiptoe past the open door of their bedroom between the hours of about 2:00 and 4:00 during those lazy afternoons, the only time me and my siblings were allowed to sit still and while away an afternoon in daydreams.

In our curve of the river, our farm was the most prosperous, well-tended, and cleanest of all the other farms in the area. We knew all our neighbors and they knew us. Neighbors were quick to help out if the cows got through a fence and ended up on someone else’s land. To my mom’s irritation, Daddy often lent his equipment to other farmers who hadn’t invested back into their own property. Too often, that equipment was returned broken or in need of repair, which required cold, hard cash on our part; cash we did not have.

We were cash poor, but we had everything we needed—food, clothing, a house, and soil that sustained us. The currency on a farm is not money but hard work. All money that the farm generated was reinvested back into its success or failure. More cattle, bigger and better equipment, more modern barns, and the bulldozing of more land so that more crops could be planted, and eventually, more land purchased. More, more, more became my father’s mantra. All this required an endless cycle of work generated by my family of eight.

When a car drove down our road, chances were we knew the driver. More likely than cars were tractors pulling tobacco setters or a manure spreader, or, later in the season, a wagon stacked ten feet high with sweet-smelling bales of hay to be stored in the barn loft.

I loved haying season. The green-gold rectangular bales seemed to march in parallel rows and straight lines down the field, grassy stubble mowed close to the ground already dried to a golden brown in the high heat of summer. I would lie in bed at night with my windows open, the breeze blowing the white net curtains aside, carrying the scent of drying hay—grassy and slightly woody, mixed with sun-warmed earth. If I felt rain on that breeze, I knew the next day Daddy and my brothers would scramble to bale the hay and get it into the barn for safekeeping before it got wet.

When the hay was finally baled and put on the wagons for transport to the barn, I would stand and watch as the hay elevator trundled each bale slowly to the top of the barn, the bales placed in neat square rows, stacked one upon the other until they reached the rafters. It was there that I spent hours upon hours of my early years, climbing to the highest bales, closest to the roof of the barn, where I could peek through the crack of the loft door. From there I could see the farm, but the farm could not see me. I could listen to the sounds carried on the wind and know where everyone in the family was at any given time. The clatter of a disc and plow meant my dad was in the field, black moist earth turned to the sun, ridges drying to a light brown in the summer heat; the tap-tap-tap of a hoe meant my mom was weeding the garden; the spray of a hose meant that one of my brothers was washing out the milk barn from that morning’s milking.

Nothing on a farm of that size is quiet. The chatter of the sparrows and robins and blue jays heralded the beginning of each day, followed by the singing of cardinals and the rapid-fire drumming of woodpeckers in the forest. The sharp barks of our border collie, Tootie, as she rounded up the cows for the afternoon milking. Chickens climbing down from their roost in the morning, ready for their stiff-legged stroll around the pen in search of forgotten grain or an ear of corn from last night’s supper thrown across the chicken wire. The braided melody of the birds, the barnyard, and the taming of all those acres by hand and machine was as ubiquitous as wind soughing through leaves, merely a backdrop to the silence inside my head.

The house in which I grew up—two stories of white clapboard—was over a hundred years old. Sometime in the first decade of living there, my mom and dad did some renovation on the inside to upgrade the kitchen and put wall heaters in the upstairs bedrooms. Before that, I remember sleeping under an electric blanket with my oldest sister and watching my breath crystallize in the freezing air. The only stoves we had were two wood stoves, one in the kitchen and one in the den, where my dad and brothers spent their time at the end of the day: Daddy reading the newspaper, my brothers watching TV. The girls were in the kitchen with my mom, cleaning the kitchen table and washing the dishes after supper.

My mom’s days never ended. It wasn’t until I had spent long years away from home that I saw her sit down at the kitchen table and take the time to eat her meal. When I was young, her normal routine was to hover around the table while doing other kitchen chores and when supper was over, she would eat quickly, and move on to the next task.

I don’t really remember the first time I realized that I did not belong. I must have been around three or four. I think it was one of the times I used to sit behind the wood stove in the kitchen, petting, with a stranglehold, some scruffy animal I had rescued—a rabbit, a kitten, or a baby skunk. I watched my older brothers and sisters sitting quietly around the big table having breakfast before the school bus arrived. It was always quiet around our table. My dad did not like to hear us talk. I don’t think he wanted us there at all. One untoward comment from anyone around that table could land a jaundiced eye from his direction. No one ever wanted to feel the smack of his baseball-mitt-sized hands, or be within the long, extended reach of our six-foot-six veteran of World War II dad.

As I sat and watched my mom and my siblings orbit my father’s mute control, I absorbed the knowledge that silence can be a magnet, repelling and pulling at the same time. They wanted to please my father, wanted to fill the emptiness, draw him closer. At the same time, they were frightened by their failure to do so, so they circled, trying to interpret the voiceless vacuum.

At one point, I came to the realization, with the unfractured soul of a child, that not only did I not belong, I wasn’t necessarily wanted. As number five of six children—number six hadn’t yet come along during my quiet forays behind the stove—I was largely ignored. I wasn’t particularly bothered by this. I was left to my own devices, at least for the first five years or so.

I can distinctly remember what I consider my first adventure, that first time rushing headlong into the rapturous feeling of escape, traveling beyond the edges of those safe places in my front yard and the surrounding barns. I must have been about four or five years old; I hadn’t started kindergarten yet. My dad had bought a pony, solid chestnut, touched by one single slash of white between his eyes. His name was Blaze.

The first time I sat on Blaze’s back, I fell in love. Blaze of the dainty ankles smelled of sweet hay and the rivulets of sweat that ran down his sun-warmed neck. I would bury my face in his thick, shaggy mane, breathing in the scent that I came to associate with freedom. Blaze didn’t have a saddle. I rode him bareback, a rope halter dangling in my soft, little girl hands. I could feel the warm scratchiness of his coarse hair brushing against my bare legs, my heels lightly encouraging him to take me where I wanted to go.

Every morning before he left for school, my brother Rick tied Blaze to the front porch. I was far too young to venture out to the fields to catch Blaze and my mom and dad were too busy to bother with traipsing after a pony. Their days began well before sunrise and ended well after sunset. This one act of kindness by my otherwise grumpy and taciturn brother set me on a journey that, to this day, has never ended.

I spent countless hours riding Blaze, traveling into the forest, listening to the murmur and susurration of overhead leaves, which seemed to whisper that I would be OK. Years later, I would come to understand how the forest became my parent, the giver of refuge, my bulwark against the world.

Sitting atop Blaze, trotting along as fast as I could encourage him to go, I felt the breeze against my skin, moving past me as it came over the horizon, from a far off, mysterious place. I soon associated rapid movement forward with a movement toward where I wanted to be.

Songs and poems are written about the wind at your back, carrying you headlong into the horizon. Not me. The wind at my back spoke of someplace I had already been. The wind in my face came from a place I had not yet seen, a compass guiding me should I lose my way.

I loved Blaze, raced down the stairs every morning to make sure he was tied to the post. Mostly, I loved more what he represented, what he made me feel. On his back, I could adventure anywhere I wanted to go—the forest, the pond, the blackberry patch, the far corn field, where he often threw me off so he could eat, leisurely, the ears of corn left over from harvest. Although I never left the farm, and in reality probably never ventured more than a half-mile, I felt like I was in another place, another country.

During those early years of meandering, no one ever came for me, nor was I peppered with frantic questions about where I had been. These were the years I set my eyes on the far horizon, dreaming of the day I could walk into its endless curve. I was drawn to the singular and the extraordinary; all things that were different roused my curiosity. It became my driving force.

I was a child of no preconceptions of differentness; no racism or religious prejudice existed in my heart. I did not understand then that I craved the experience of different lands, different cultures, different people. Maybe there, I would recognize myself in others. Because as hard as I tried, I could not see my own likeness at home.

CHAPTER TWO

SCHEHERAZADE’S CARPET

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself wih a little book.

—Thomas à Kempis

My early years of freedom on the farm were short-lived. As soon as I started school, I was deemed old enough to work in the house, and later in the yard, the gardens, and the fields. On the farm, work was not only expected, it was required. Otherwise, you suffered the reach of my father and the overworked and weary wrath of my mother.

I can distill the memories from my early years on the farm into the most basic elements that would eventually carry me away from that farm in central Kentucky: the desire to travel, my love of books and music, the curiosity and need to paint a clear and vivid picture of understanding, and memories of my mom. But this last realization would take years of understanding.

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I don’t remember a time I couldn’t read. Perhaps this is because once I discovered books, the exploration that took place between the ink and paper became one of the greatest passions of my life.

My brother, Jimmie, was thirteen years older than me. Being the eldest, he had been the one to fight Daddy about going to college, paving the way for the rest of us. He also gave me the gift of books. I came home from school one day to find our back porch filled floor to ceiling with hundreds of volumes. Jimmie had purchased all the books from a local estate sale. Books were everywhere: stacked in towers of varying shades of brown and black, older volumes not yet tainted by modern standards of colorful art and design; the smell of dry paper, the dust falling in crumbs from the pages. I hid amongst the ziggurats and pyramids when I was supposed to be doing chores. Opening, closing, and sniffing out exotic, faraway places tucked behind that curve of horizon I longed to follow. I became a hummingbird in the high heat of summer, flitting from blossom to bud, sampling, sustained by the life-giving nectar of words, words that became desire and imagination entwined.

This oasis became my own personal library for a time until it departed, along with my brother, to the house he shared with his new wife. By this time, one of my older sisters had her driver’s license and she deigned to drive me to the library on occasion for a supply of new books. I had been forced to flee to the local downtown library because Mrs. Caldwell, the librarian at my elementary school, had started to limit the number of books I could check out. She did not believe I could read five books in one week. She was right. I was reading ten or more, depending on the book and on how late I was able to stay awake each night after homework and chores. Mrs. Caldwell was universally disliked, and feared, by all the kids in elementary school. During library time, she never failed to give someone a swat on the side of their leg as she roamed the room, looking for some snot-nosed kid to exhibit the tiniest iota of cheeriness, which must have been disallowed in her universe. I never saw her smile.

I won the Bookworm of the Year award almost every year in elementary school. Mrs. Caldwell, ever skeptical of my reading ability, would make me stand in front of her desk and provide a brief recital for each book. She was not much taller than I was, but was built like a tree stump—straight up and down, with a bosom that projected out of her polyester double-knit dress like the formidable prow of a pirate ship. A long-chained necklace snaked horizontally across the broad expanse, the locket dangling vertically just over the edge, swinging back and forth in metronomic rhythm as she stood staring at me, arms akimbo. As I described the plot of each book in the greatest detail, it crossed my mind to ask her how she would know for sure if I had read the book. I suspected Mrs. Caldwell had never ventured into the enthralling depths of a book beyond forcing it into its appropriate Dewey Decimal order, as she did with the unruly students she disliked, meant to be seen but not read.

What I did not tell Mrs. Caldwell was that elementary school reading was a piece of cake; one book per evening was my norm. By that time, my older siblings were already in college and I secretly read their textbooks. When they read the classics, I read the classics. When they learned about history, I learned about history. Later, in high school and college, I realized I had read the lion’s share of the required classics between the ages of seven and twelve. The only one I ever reread later in life was The Grapes of Wrath. I distinctly remember where I was when I read the last scene for the first time. I was hiding behind my sister’s bed. It was her book after all and I feared taking it too far from where she always left it. I instinctively felt the poverty, the despair, the sense of dislocation of the characters. Yet, I did not understand why a grown woman would nurse a grown man like a baby. I remember sitting there on the floor, in the half-darkness between the bed and the wardrobe, my back against the wall feeling a peculiar sense of… weirdness. I wasn’t disgusted or grossed out, but knew something had been said, in the saying of nothing, something I did not understand. This was a new sensation; no matter how I pondered it, my young mind couldn’t illuminate it with meaning.

Eventually books began to morph into the desire for adventure, to travel, to see faraway places. The sense of never belonging, knowing I was meant to leave one day, that other worlds were calling to me; wrapped itself around a feeling of heaviness in my chest, followed by the thickness in my throat, tears near the surface, longing to be somewhere else. Standing in front of the shelves at the library, I wanted to see the Wild West of Annie Oakley; I wanted to smell the fresh pine of the lower Sierras during the booming Gold Rush with Lola Montez and Lotta Crabtree. I wanted to feel the wind in my face while soaring the skies as Amelia Earhart. I wanted to be anywhere, as long as it was far away from Greensburg, Kentucky.

I read everything. Sitting at breakfast eating my poached egg on toast, drinking my cup of tea, I would read the box of oatmeal, the label on the Lipton tea box, the peanut butter jar.

Around the age of eleven or twelve, I had explored my way through several volumes of the new set of encyclopedias that my mom and dad had bought from a traveling salesman. I can’t imagine the cost of such a luxury for our cash-strapped household, but I know my mom insisted that this window to the world outside our farm should become a part of our lives. Despite her constant weariness, Mom was curious and loved to learn new things. She would order seeds to grow asparagus and cauliflower in the garden, both exotic vegetables to our meat-and-potatoes diet. She bought a furniture restoration kit so that she could bring a renewed luster to our old furniture. Looking back now, I believe Mom wanted the encyclopedias as much for her insatiable curiosity as she wanted them for her children.

With the arrival of those encyclopedias, I immediately became an armchair traveler and fixated on Egypt and the pyramids. I decided I was going to be the next Howard Carter, sifting through dust and sand, seeking some long-lost civilization waiting to be discovered.

I took to following along behind my father’s tractor as he plowed the fields in the springtime. My bare feet would sink into the moist, cool loam. When I felt a sharp prick or the pressure of a rock under my toes, I would drop to my hands and knees, digging for ancient treasure, in the process picking up arrowheads and tomahawks, pristine and intact. I would clean, then painstakingly draw each one on a sheet of paper, measuring, detailing where it was found, writing my own speculation as to how it got there and to whom it belonged. This would prove to be a harbinger for my career as an FBI agent, sifting through evidence and intelligence, documenting details of an investigation.

Mrs. Miller and the Bookmobile became my Scheherazade on a magic carpet, delivering fables and legends to my doorstep. The Bookmobile, an old box van emblazoned with bright blue letters, had probably been used by a bakery or bread company at one point. Whenever I saw it pull into the driveway of the farm, I raced across whatever field I was working in, hoping she wouldn’t drive away. Mrs. Miller never minded I was usually dirty and barefoot. She let me scan the shelves as long as I wished, or until my mom came to drag me away. From June until August, Mrs. Miller arrived once a week and let me check out as many books as I wanted. She allowed me to be an armchair traveler all summer long.

Though I worked in the field by day, by night, I time-traveled to remote and alien lands. As my bare feet dug themselves into sun-warmed earth, picking tomatoes or cucumbers, hoeing row after row of newly planted tobacco, my mind strolled the streets of sixteenth-century London with Queen Elizabeth I, or struggled through the passes of the Rockies with a wagon train. My back grew strong and my imagination soared.

I longed to see the Far Pavilions of M. M. Kaye and trek the Silk Road with Marco Polo. My ears perked as I imagined the sound of a train whistling in the distance—the sound of promise, the sound of things to come, the sound of places past.

My desire to flee began to morph into an imperative.

CHAPTER THREE

MY MOTHER’S SILENCE

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman.

—Euripides, Medea

One of my earliest memories is watching my mom pull the dry, sun-scented laundry from the clothesline. I must have been about three or four years old. It was before my little sister, the sixth and last child of our family, was born. I was standing in the grass, barefoot as usual. My mother’s left arm gathered the crisp white sheet in folds, as her right hand reached up to unclip the wooden clothespins.

I loved that clothesline. Row upon row of sheets and pillowcases and towels became my own personal funhouse as I wove in and out, running my hands along the fabric, hearing the rasp of little girl fingertips against the roughened chicken feed-sack pillowcases, printed with tiny flowers and other intricate and exotic designs, none matching. Mom was thrifty and covered all our chicken-feather-stuffed pillows with feed sack pillowcases, the life of a farmyard chicken coming full circle. I can still recall waking up in the middle of the night feeling a scratch on my face or ear, the random point of a chicken feather having worked its way out of the blue-and-white ticking. In the light of day, I would grasp the sharp, hollow point and slowly pull downy barbs of white or yellow or red. I would try to remember which chicken had given those feathers, its headless body dunked in the coal packer of steaming hot water to loosen the quills, to be plucked, then fried, ending up on our kitchen table alongside mashed potatoes, homemade biscuits, gravy, and corn on the cob.

As my mom’s arm reached to pull the dry laundry to her, her hand froze in midair and I heard her gasp, a sharp intake of breath that seemed to catch in her throat, sharp as a chicken bone. I felt my own body go rigid. At a very tender age, I could absorb my mother’s moods, though she held a glacial self-control over her emotions. I had already learned there would never be any hugs, never a quick kiss, never a minute to listen to my real or imagined fears. Fear was a weakness, not to be tolerated.

I was alarmed at the look of revulsion on her face. Following the path of her gaze, I saw a snake sinuously winding its way around her feet. She kicked her foot out, then stepped wide, over the snake’s body. She didn’t make another sound, not a shriek, not a grunt. Rooted in place, I realized it was not just one snake, but two—long and thin, black and gray—twined around each other like a serpentine yin and yang. In the middle, where they wrapped around each other, was the space, now empty of my mother’s presence, leaving only the warmth of her bare feet.

I think I was too young yet to be afraid of snakes. During the few seconds I continued to watch their slow, languorous embrace, I heard Mom running back across the grass. She carried a long-handled hoe, sharp, always readied for some chore in the garden or yard. She raised the hoe over her head, the handle as long as she was tall; she had to stand some distance away from the snakes. Her lips pinched together in a white slash, eyes focused on the ground in front of her, she brought the hoe down, severing the head of the first snake. She sliced, again and again, both snakes in multiple pieces, thrashing in the grass. She continued slashing in rhythmic fury until there was no movement, not in the grass, not in her arms. Without a word or a look in my direction, she turned, dragging the hoe behind her as if too exhausted to lift it off the ground. I don’t remember if I cried or made a sound. But I do remember her silence.

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My mom’s thick, work-worn hands kneaded the dough, not with a tenderness, oblivious to the silky texture of flour melting into the buttery dough. Her movements were brisk and hurried, impatient for the ingredients to submit to the insistent will of her fingers. I watched as her left hand broadcast a light dusting of flour on the countertop, right hand slapping the ball of dough into the middle of the circle, tiny motes of flour dancing in the sunlight streaming through the window. The muscles of her forearms flexed and relaxed, the rapid movements a silent echo of the slap-slap of the rolling pin. Satisfied with her results, she used a table knife to dot pats of ice-cold butter onto the now flat circle of dough, followed by spoons full of homemade strawberry jam. With an uncharacteristic gesture of tenderness, she grasped the far side of the circle of dough in the tips of her fingers and folded it softly over the mound of buttery sweetness. Using the index and middle fingers of her right hand, she pinched the edges together in tiny, consecutive points and valleys, a crenellated half-circle, the turnover now ready for the oven. I remember standing by her side, on the braided twine stepstool. But I don’t remember her voice.

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Flower beds skirted the four sides of my childhood home. The 1850s clapboard façade had been painted and repainted varying shades of white, layer upon countless layer. Zinnias, always my favorite, with lacy orange and yellow faces, echoed the intricacy of the doilies